Rating Summary
“Great phone with lots of features. ”
- Every day computer user, tech savvy
Samsung - Gravity 2 Cell Phone —
The Samsung Gravity 2 has a 1,000-entry phone book, with room in each entry for four numbers, four e-mail addresses, three IM usernames, a URL, a birthday, an anniversary date, a street address, and notes. You can categorize your contacts into groups, and pair them with a photo for caller ID, or one of 21 polyphonic ringtones. Other basics include a speakerphone, a vibrate mode, a calendar, an alarm clock, a tasks list, a memo pad, a calculator, a tip calculator, a world clock, a unit converter, a timer, and a stopwatch.
If you turn the phone 90 degrees counterclockwise and slide the phone up, you'll reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. The display orientation automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode once it slides out. Flanking the keyboard are two soft keys to be used when the screen is in landscape mode. There are arrow keys on the bottom right for navigation, plus a dedicated OK key, a Shift/Symbol key, and a .com/www key, which is handy for entering URLs. The keyboard is overall quite roomy, with raised keys that make for quick and responsive texting.
More advanced users will like the voice recognition, stereo Bluetooth, the RSS reader, and the addition of A-GPS support with TeleNav turn-by-turn direction software available through T-Mobile. We were also pleasantly surprised that the Gravity 2 comes with a decent full HTML browser. It supports JavaScript as well as a version of Flash Lite that let us view streaming YouTube videos. The Gravity 2's small screen size wasn't too great for surfing the Web, though; we had to scroll around a lot more, especially in large Web pages. Resizing pages was a pain, too, as you had to use the magnifying glass zoom controls, which require several button presses. On the whole though, we were happy that the Gravity 2 has a HTML browser at all. It definitely takes advantage of the Gravity 2's speedy 3G.
Since the Gravity 2 is a messaging-focused phone, it was only fitting that it comes with several messaging options. Not only can you send the normal text and multimedia messages, you can also send instant messages (from AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live), audio postcards (which are framed photos with an audio attachment), and e-mail. You can create e-mail accounts from a variety of providers, like AOL, Yahoo, Comcast, and more, but bear in mind that you can't just enter in a POP3 or IMAP server address, so your provider may not be supported.
The Gravity 2 comes with a rather basic music player. The tracks are organized by artists and albums, and you can also create and edit your own playlists. You can tweak the visualizations during music playback, add up to nine sound effects, which include "Wide" and "Surround" sound, and set it so that the music plays in the background when you're in other parts of the phone. Of course you can also set the tracks on repeat or shuffle. You can load your music via a microSD card. The Gravity 2 supports MP3, AAC, and AAC+ file formats.
Our one main draw back to the phone is how many steps it takes to access anything. I have never had to press so many buttons just to look up one person in my contacts list, or to change my ring style. Otherwise, this is a great phone.
